Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07015. Sanctification means being set apart, and if you grasp that one idea you have the doctrine in your hand. The word group behind it in Hebrew and Greek does not primarily mean to become morally impressive. It means to be marked off for a particular use, taken out of general circulation and reserved…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07014. Justification is the moment a guilty sinner is declared righteous by God, and I want to be precise about that word declared, because everything hangs on it. God does not pretend that we are better than we are, and he does not wait until we have improved enough to deserve the verdict. He…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07013. How can a person be saved? It is the oldest question in the book, quite literally, since the Philippian jailer asked it in almost those words at midnight with an earthquake still settling around him. Paul’s answer to him was one sentence long, and I have never been able to improve on it:…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07012. God’s salvation is a rescue, and that single word does more work than any other in explaining what Christians mean when they use the term. We are not describing self-improvement, or moral effort, or the gradual refinement of a decent person into a slightly better one. We are describing somebody being pulled out…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07011. Soteriology is the theological name for the doctrine of salvation, and it is the part of Christian teaching that answers the question every one of us eventually has to face: how can a guilty person be made right with a holy God? The word comes from the Greek soteria, meaning rescue or deliverance,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07010. If salvation is by faith alone, why does James say that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone? That is a fair question and it deserves a straight answer rather than a shuffle. James 2:24 is the only place in the Bible where the words faith alone appear together,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07009. The sin unto death in 1 John 5:16-17 is one of those phrases that people trip over at the very end of a letter otherwise full of comfort, and it stops them dead. John has spent five chapters telling his readers how they may know that they have eternal life, and then, almost…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 07008. Hebrews 6:4-6 is the passage people reach for when they want to argue that a genuine believer can be lost, and the language about falling away is undeniably severe. I am not going to pretend otherwise, and I have no patience with treatments that wave the difficulty away. If you have been troubled…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07007. Paul’s command to work out your own salvation with fear and trembling has frightened more Christians than almost any other sentence he wrote, and the fright is entirely unnecessary once you see where the sentence sits. Read on its own it sounds as though salvation is a project we complete under threat. Read…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 07006. Few passages have caused more private agony than the one about the unforgivable sin, and I have lost count of the number of believers who have come to me convinced that they have committed it. They are almost always the last people on earth who could have done so, and I want to…